The 2016 Polar Plunge took place at Walla Walla Point Park on Saturday. About $15,000 was raised at the event to benefit Special Olympic athletes and 57 plungers took the dip into the frigid Columbia River.

Each year, our small team at the Washington Apple Education Foundation (WAEF) gets to help a growing number of students attend college. This year one of our students returned to share her experiences at our annual luncheon.

You may have heard that US Mat Systems is moving into the long-shuttered Longview Fibre mill in Chelan County. Company officials opted to move operations from Oregon to the Winton site for a number of reasons, including access to a Canadian market, access to rail at the site, and low-cost power. The company builds specialty wood and steel mats for oil rigs using proprietary designs that are protected by patents. It is no doubt a “win” for the region.

Earlier this year, The Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce assumed the responsibility of handling destination marketing for the Valley. A key component of that marketing effort involves sports, which is the basis behind the existence of the Wenatchee Valley Sports Council and its partnership with the Chamber.

I like to joke that for us Eastsiders, the Washington state evergreen is actually big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), not the legislature-adopted Douglas-fir tree. In our arid region of low rainfall, cold winters and hot dry summers, big sagebrush grows five to eight feet tall, forming a canopy above a sea of grasses, smaller shrubs, and wildflowers.

I came to Wenatchee almost thirty years ago, and after stints with my husband in Burns and Prineville, Oregon and Elko, Nevada (and a brief layover in Spokane) it seemed like a metropolis. Always a bargain hunter, I became a fan of Grocery Outlet pretty early on. This poem was inspired by the scent of a particular soap I found there one day.

Most would think that a military veteran’s main hurdle when coming back home from service would be something substantial – post-traumatic stress disorder, adjusting back to civilian life, etc. However, something as seemingly small as having a safe place to rest one’s head is a reality many vets face as much as anyone else.

Nestled in the foliage on the corner of First Street and Wenatchee Avenue, a contemplative yet whimsical frog invites our gaze. With a closer look, we see the lotus reflected in his eyes and grasp the meaning of Leo Osborne’s poem about his sculpture, “Lotus Seeker”:

East Wenatchee’s landscape began a transformation in 1908 with the completion of the Columbia River Bridge and its life-giving irrigation pipeline. Like Wenatchee before the Highline Canal, the east side was characterized by sagebrush, rabbit brush and other tough shrub-steppe plants that could survive through hot, dry summers and only a few inches of rain a year. Irrigation changed this, not only for orchards but for small residential lots where gardens and flowering shrubs now could thrive.